“I keep telling her she should go on Jeopardy,” Marino says.
“It’s possible his name might be in a registry,” I comment. “Something with Sock in it, assuming we have no luck with a microchip.”
“Assuming you find the damn dog,” Marino says.
“We’re running his prints, his DNA. Right away, I hope?” Benton stares intently at the body, as if he’s talking to it.
“I printed him this morning and no luck, nothing in IAFIS. Nothing in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. We’ll have his DNA tomorrow and run it through CODIS.” Marino’s big gloved hands place the ruler under the man’s chin. “It’s kind of strange about the dog, though. Someone’s got to have him. I’m thinking we should put out info for the media about a lost greyhound and a number people can call.”
“Nothing from us,” I reply. “Right now we’re staying away from the media.”
“Exactly,” Benton says. “We don’t want the bad guys knowing we’re even aware of the dog, much less looking for it.”
“‘Bad guys’?” Anne says.
“What else?” I walk around the table, doing what Lucy calls a “high recon,” looking carefully at the body from head to toe.
Marino is taking photographs, and he says, “Before we put him back in the fridge this morning, I checked his hands for trace, collected anything preliminarily, including personal effects.”
“You didn’t tell me about personal effects. Just that he didn’t seem to have any,” I reply.
“A ring with a crest on it, a steel Casio watch. A couple keys on a keychain. Let’s see what else. A twenty-dollar bill. A little wooden stash box, empty, but I swabbed it for drugs. The stash box on the video clip. For a second you could see him holding it right after he got to Norton’s Woods.”
“Where was it recovered?” I ask.
“In his pocket. That’s where I found it.”
“So he took it out of his pocket at the park and then put it back in his pocket before his terminal event.” I remember what I watched on the iPad, the small box held in the black glove.
“I’d say we should be looking for the snorting or smoking variety,” Marino says. “I’m betting weed. Don’t know if you noticed,” he says to me, “but he had a glass pipe in an ashtray on his desk.”
“We’ll see what shows up on tox,” I reply. “We’ll do a STAT alcohol and expedite a drug screen. How backed up are they up there?”
“I’ll tell Joe to move it to the head of the line,” Anne refers to the chief toxicologist, who I brought with me from New York, rather shamelessly stole him from the NYPD crime labs. “You’re the boss. All you’ve got to do is ask.” She meets my eyes. “Welcome back.”
“What kind of crest, and what does the keychain look like?” Benton asks Marino.
“A coat of arms, an open book with three crowns,” he says, and I can tell when he enjoys having Benton at a disadvantage. The CFC is Marino’s turf. “No writing on it, no phrase in Latin, nothing like that. I don’t know what the crests for MIT and Harvard are.”
“Not what you described,” Benton answers. “Okay if I use this?” He indicates a computer on the counter.
“The keychain is one of those steel rings attached to a leather loop, like you’d snap around your belt,” Marino goes on. “And as we all know, no wallet, not even a cell phone, and I think that’s unusual. Who walks around with no cell phone?”
“He was taking his dog out and listening to music. Maybe he wasn’t planning to be out very long and didn’t want to talk on the phone,” Benton says as he types in search words.
I pull the body over on its right side and look at Marino. “You want to help me with this?”
“Three crowns and an open book,” Benton says. “City University of San Francisco.” He types some more. “An online university specializing in health sciences. Would an online university have class rings?”
“And his personal effects are in which locker?” I ask Marino.
“Numero uno. I got the key if you want it.”
“I would. Anything the labs need to check?”
“Can’t see why.”
“Then we’ll keep his personal effects until they go to a funeral home or to his family, when we figure out who he is,” I reply.
“And then there’s Oxford,” Benton says next, still searching the Internet. “But if the ring he had on was Oxford, it would have Oxford University on it, and you said it didn’t have any writing or motto.”
“It didn’t,” Marino replies. “But it looks like someone had it made, you know, plain gold and engraved with the crest, so maybe it wouldn’t be as official as what you order from a school and wouldn’t have a motto or writing.”
“Maybe,” Benton says. “But if the ring was made, I have a hard time imagining it’s for Oxford University, would be more inclined to think if someone went to an online college he might have a ring made because maybe there’s no other way to get one, assuming you want to tell the world you’re an alum of an online college. This is the City University of San Francisco coat of arms.” Benton moves to one side so Marino can see what’s on the computer screen, an elaborate crest with blue-and-gold mantling, and a gold owl on top with three gold fleur-de-lis, then below three gold crowns, and in the middle an open book.
Marino is holding the body on its side, and he squints at the computer screen from where he’s standing and shrugs. “Maybe. If it was engraved, you know, if the person had it made for him, maybe it wouldn’t be that detailed. That could be it.”
“I’ll look at the ring,” I promise as I examine the body externally and make notes on a clipboard.
“No reason to think he was in a struggle, and we might get a perp’s DNA or something off the watch or whatever. But you know me.” Marino resumes what he was saying to me about processing the dead man’s personal effects. “I swabbed everything anyway. Nothing struck me as unusual except that his watch had quit, one of those self-winding kind that Lucy likes, a chronograph.”
“What time did it stop?”
“I got it written down. Sometime after four a.m. About twelve hours after he died. So he’s got a nine-mil with eighteen rounds but no phone,” he then says. “Okay. I guess so unless he didn’t leave it at home and in fact somebody took it. Maybe took the dog, too. That’s what I keep wondering.”
“There was a phone on a desk in the video clips I saw,” I remind him. “Plugged into a charger near one of the laptops, I believe. Near the glass smoking pipe you mentioned.”
“We couldn’t see everything he did in there before he left. I figured he might have grabbed his phone on his way out,” Marino supposes. “Or he might have more than one. Who the hell knows?”
“We’ll know when we find his apartment,” Benton says as he prints what he’s found on the Internet. “I’d like to see the scene photos.”
“You mean when I find the apartment.” Marino puts the camera down on a countertop. “Because it’s going to be me poking around. Cops gossip worse than old women. I find where the guy lives, then I’ll ask for help.”
8
On a body diagram, I note that at eleven-fifteen p.m. the dead man is fully rigorous and refrigerated cold. He has a pattern of dark-red discoloration and positional blanching that indicates he was flat on his back with his arms straight by his sides, palms down, fully clothed, and wearing a watch on his left wrist and a ring on his left little finger for at least twelve hours after he died.
Postmortem hypostasis, better known as lividity or livor mortis, is one of my pet tattletales, although it is often misinterpreted even by those who should know better. It can look like bruising due to trauma when in fact it is caused by the mundane physiological phenomenon of noncirculating blood pooling into small vessels due to gravity. Lividity is a dusky red or can be purplish with lighter areas of blanching where areas of the body rested against a firm surface, and no matter what I’m told about the circumstances of a death, the body itself doesn’t lie.